Author: CHARACTER COUNTS!

Guest post by Sonia Lowman Imagine having to talk parents into giving up their children with the promise that you only may be able to save them from an otherwise near-sure fate of death. Could you picture carrying this enormous responsibility for the safety of total strangers, all the while risking your own life? That […]

Guest post by Sonia Lowman Are you a by-stander or an up-stander? Can you stand up for what’s right, even when it’s not easy or popular? How do we, together, learn to respect differences and reach out to those in need? These are the kinds of questions that we at the Lowell Milken Center (LMC) […]

Spotted any good billboards lately? There are some positively positive ones popping up around the country as part of the Smile Across America campaign, which will culminate in the International Day of Happiness on March 20. In San Antonio, one of the billboards carries the message that “Superheroes are real. You’re one of them.” Barbara Gruener, a veritable […]

Character education is not extra. Instead, it must be integrated into the fabric of our schools so that it becomes a habit that drives decisions, outcomes, and the overall culture. That statement, from a recent article in the newsletter of the Alliance for Student Activities, sums up the longstanding approach of CHARACTER COUNTS!. The article — titled Shaping […]

Have you thanked a school counselor this week? The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) has set aside February 2-6 this year as National School Counseling Week. The idea is to create awareness of the services that school counselors provide to your school family. Here’s how the ASCA website puts it: National School Counseling Week 2015, “Celebrate School […]

It’s the second annual White House Student Film Festival! And it’s open to U.S. students, grades K-12. This year’s theme — The Impact of Giving Back — is perfect for your CHARACTER COUNTS! program. The White House says it’s looking for videos that “tell a story about paying it forward, about community service, or what making a […]

[This post comes to us from one of our favorite educators and authors: Barbara Gruener, a counselor and character coach at Westwood-Bales Elementary School in Friendswood, Texas. Check out her blog, The Corner on Character, and order her new book, What’s Under Your Cape? Superheroes of the Character Kind, in our online store.] A song that comes to […]

By Jeff McMurdy, National Director of CHARACTER COUNTS! Memorable Moments When I review the year that is about to end, I could measure it in many ways but the metric that matters most to me is how did we grow the mission? It’s not an easy metric to calculate. You can use raw data like […]

Tomorrow — November 13 — is World Kindness Day. To help you get in the spirit, we’re posting a list of six ways you can show kindness. Learn about the day, and get more ideas, on the website of the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. This list is excerpted from Barbara Gruener’s keynote address to […]

In the weeks leading up to the Character Education Partnership’s annual conference (Oct. 30 – Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C.), we have been looking at exemplary character education programs at schools around the United States. In today’s post, senior CHARACTER COUNTS! trainer Dr. Gary Smit shows how people outside the 50 states have embraced CC!. Gary has played […]